Miriam: Sushi and Camel Burgers
This weekend's culinary adventures can be united by one thing (other than price): no mayonnaise on salad! Hooray! We went to a sushi restaurant on Saturday night. We had heard nothing but praise for this restaurant with people saying that it was even better than Nobu and all the best and favorite sushi places in America. Braced for the high prices, we took a petit taxi to Kiotori, a chain of Japanese restaurants in Morocco. The decor was sumptuous with the chefs working on the floor above us, showcased in glass. I bet you've never seen a sushi waitress wearing a headscarf before. The first disappointment of the night came with the announcement that they had no tuna. NO TUNA?! TUNA IS SUSHI! We had to rethink our entire order when we realized that we had planned to eat tuna in nearly every dish. Instead, we had a nice unagi/roe/avocado/crab roll, a crunchy roll with tempura shrimp and some heavenly sauce (maybe the best eel sauce ever), and then some kappamaki, tekkamaki with salmon instead of tuna, and california rolls with and without cream cheese. This came with a salad and miso soup. The salad was comprised of long strips of finely shredded cabbage and carrots with this horseradish vinaigrette. It was a bit difficult to eat with chopsticks. The miso soup had tofu (!!!!!!!), our first since coming here. They served it in a cute bowl with a lid, but it wasn't piping hot and the spoon was stoneware, which was remarkably heavy! The second disappointment was at dessert, when they had neither the passionfruit nor lychee ice cream listed on the menu. I was even going to just order a handroll: it was mango, avocado, and tempura shrimp with other yummy things, but they couldn't do that either!! Probably a good thing we left it at that, because we spent nearly $50. For Morocco, that is LUDICROUS. For sushi, that is about par for the course. We thought we'd splurge anyway, since we missed the trip to Marrakesh. As an added bonus, they took MasterCard, so we didn't have to pay out all our cash.
Today, we went back to Cafe Clock (which I may not have posted on this blog). It's run by a Brit in the Medina Qadima and is incredibly popular with tourists. It is a very nice cafe, but the prices are most certainly tourist prices. I was hell-bent on going to the Medina today, even though it was raining. I didn't realize that the streets would be rivers of mud, but we got to the cafe without getting too filthy and then I ordered their famous camel burger, which came with fries and salad. The fries were light, not drowned in oil like most fries in Morocco. Unfortunately, without a dip, I think I would have preferred oily fries! Back to the sandwich: it was AMAZING. It was my first time having camel, but it was out of this world tasty. They dressed it up with "taza ketchup." I have no idea what that means, but it was just like haroset, which is a Jewish dish served at Passover and is sweet, made with fresh apples, dried dates, raisins, apricots, figs, walnuts, and wine. We like to eat it with raw horseradish on matzoh. Digression aside, it was an interesting and complimentary addition to the meat, which also had an onion slice, lettuce, and tomato. As per my usual, the onion went to Aaron and I enjoyed the burger slowly. The salad that came with the meal had a horseradishy vinaigrette! And hence the connection between sushi and camel burger. I also had a mocha and then a hot chocolate (it's rainy, forgive my drink choices), but this is the only place I've ever had unsweetened mocha and hot chocolate. This is especially surprising since most Moroccan drinks are comprised of sugar with some liquid on the side. Pictures are of Cafe Clock, I need to get the sushi ones off my camera.
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